I'm a libertarian lawyer and college professor. I blog on religion, history, constitutional law, government policy, philosophy, sexuality, and the American Founding. Everything is fair game though. Over the years, I've been involved in numerous group blogs that come and go. This blog archives almost everything I write.
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Thursday, December 03, 2015

John Fea at the AHA

As I was jotting down possible sessions I might want to attend I came across AHA Session 3 on Thursday afternoon: "Are the Culture Wars History? New Comments on an Old Concept."
I was attracted by the high-powered panel of historians--Andrew
Hartman, Adam Laats, Natalia Petrzeal, Stephen Prothero, and Leo
Ribuffo. I marked it down as a must-attend panel. Then I read the "Session Abstract." Here it is:

In 2012,
Messiah College history professor John Fea set Glenn Beck and his
followers ablaze when he claimed that Barack Obama might be “the most
explicitly Christian President in America.” Responding to the hundreds
of angry comments he received, Fea wrote a follow-up post on the need
for civility entitled “The Culture Wars Are Real.” The title of Fea’s
essay was old news, as Americans had been talking about the “culture
wars” ever since the publication of James Davison Hunter’s 1991 book on
the subject. Yet Fea’s title also betrayed a tone of defensiveness—that
maybe, for some, the culture wars weren’t and aren’t real.

The Fea
incident was a reminder of everything that historians still don’t know
about one of the most familiar analytical concepts of the past
twenty-five years. ...